If Dick Cheney won't tell us which energy fat cats drew up our energy policy, he's not going to tell us why we're paying to renovate his pad.

The construction, which could last 16 months, is related to ''national security and homeland defense,'' according to a letter from the observatory's superintendent printed in The Washington Post.

I'd say we have four possibilities:

1. Mr. Cheney is building a giant vault. Now that a judge appointed by the president says that anything the vice president does can be kept secret, there is even more incentive for him to run the government so everything can be secret and stored away in the vault.

2. He's suffering from a bad case of bunker envy and wants a command center and bunker like the president's in the White House and Rummy's in the Pentagon.

3. He's digging a tunnel in case he has his priorities backward and we should be more concerned with Al Qaeda than Iraq. A secret tunnel at his house could easily feed into the secret tunnel at the nearby Russian Embassy leading up to a safe house; the tunnel was built in the late 1970's by the F.B.I. and National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Russian diplomats, and abandoned after the Russians found out about it from the F.B.I. counterspy Robert Hanssen.

4. He's constructing an underground disco. If he appears in a Travolta white suit and gold chains, his desire to replicate the Gerald Ford era would be realized.

It's a mystery why President Bush doesn't want to stock his cabinet with his contemporaries from Yale, Harvard and Texas, rather than retreads from the wilted salad days when Cheney and Rummy were ruling the Ford White House.

On Monday Mr. Bush again heeded Mr. Cheney and chose a Ford official to be Treasury secretary (replacing the Ford official who was just fired from the job) to work with the Ford official who is Fed chairman.

Yesterday he chose an old Ford hand as head of the S.E.C. And we have the recrudescence of the secretary of state under Ford and Nixon, Henry Kissinger.

Ford was the Fillmore of our time. His administration was famous for its hapless economic policy, fighting inflation with marketing, passing out those silly little buttons that read WIN (Whip Inflation Now). What do we remember of that era except the pardoning of Nixon, the fall of Saigon and the falls of Chevy Chase?

The lasting mark of that White House was tamping down the post-Watergate zeal for truth, containing Congressional and media investigations into C.I.A. abuses such as assassinations of foreign leaders and F.B.I. overreaching on infiltrating civil rights groups.

It was in that battle that the Ford alumni -- Rummy, Cheney & Kissy -- forged their worldview that the greatest threat to the country was the prying eyes of the public, the press and Congress.

Trent Lott may want to turn the clock back to Jim Crow. Mr. Cheney just wants to go back to a time before Vietnam and Watergate, when there was more government secrecy and less moral relativism.

The administration is chockablock with people who kept the public and Congress in the dark on foreign intrigue. Adm. John Poindexter, who took the fall for Iran-contra, is now in charge of expanding the universe of secrets to include dossiers at the Pentagon on every living American, under the Orwellian heading of Office of Information Awareness.

Elliott Abrams, who misled Congress on Iran-contra and was pardoned by the first President Bush, is in charge of the Middle East for the second President Bush. Otto Reich, who worked with Ollie North and ran the covert program to get public support for the contras, now runs Latin American policy.

Maybe instead of worrying about American children who don't do history lessons, we should worry about American presidents who don't care about the lessons of history.